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Saturday, 3 March 2018

Travel Beyond the Crypt: Grant Museum of Zoology

A friend recommended I visit the Museum of Zoology the next time I'm in London, so I visited when I was there the other day. This is quite an unknown museum so it's a nice little find I'm glad I took the time to visit. It is full to the brim with taxidermy, skeletons, wet specimens and all manner of dead and preserved things.

The Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy can be found at the Rockefeller Building, 21 University St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 6DE and is near the tube stations Warren Street and Euston, both on the Victoria line. It is part of UCL, the University College of London, so there are usually lots of university students there. There are also activities for children held there, so I can imagine it's a popular school trip location as well. It's not open very long each day, from 1pm-5pm and closed on Sundays but it has free entry.

Wet specimen of a white rabbit head.

A beautiful preserved and pinned butterfly, one of many in the museum.

A full cabinet of preserved brains, including human.

Wet specimens, including an entire jar of moles! My friend and I found this hilarious and interesting, whilst I overheard other patrons say "...Why would someone want a jar of moles?". This poor museum is wasted on the mainstream public!

An adorable little frog skeleton! You know you're a true Goth when you find the skeleton far cuter than the actual frog when it's alive...

The museum has a whole corner called The Micrarium, covered wall to wall with some 2,000 microscopic slides of many animals and species. The whole Grant Museum is actually home to over 20,000 microscopic slides so this is only a small portion of them! Over 95% of all known animal species are smaller than our thumb, which I found fascinating, so the museum dedicated a corner to some of these creatures to challenge museums that fill their museums with larger animals and skeletons.

The museum holds over 68,000 specimens, covering the whole animal kingdom. It's quite a small museum but jam-packed with specimens, I highly recommend a visit if you're nearby!